|
FROM THE BOOK:
As a reminder of
the dreams she'd realized with Thalberg, she kept the house in Santa
Monica for another nineteen years and maintained it as if she still lived
there. Occasionally she returned to play out her role as a leading hostess
and give dinner parties there. At one point she rented it to Moss Hart and
his wife, the actress Kitty Carlisle, when he was in Hollywood writing the
screenplay for A Star Is Born.
"Once
a week, Norma would arrive at the house with a huge bouquet of fake
flowers to replace the ones from the week before," Kitty Carlisle
Hart recalls. To Hart, Norma's appearance in 1954 was in stark contrast to
the glamorous figure she had been dazzled by when she was a dinner guest
at the Thalbergs' in the 1930s. "Now she seemed housewifely to me.
She wore shirtwaist dresses." Hart had not been in the house for too
long before she stumbled upon the legend. "When we rented the house,
Norma told me the attic would be locked. I told her I wouldn't rent the
house if there was a room that was locked in case of a fire. So she agreed
to leave the key on a nail next to the attic door.
Well,
on the first rainy day, I went up. it was an Aladdin's cave. All her
leatherbound scrapbooks were there. Racks and racks of cloths-
evening capes, gowns. There were shoes that looked like they'd never been
worn. There before me was the detritus of a lifetime.
|
